Here’s to Misplaced Priorities

For four years, I’ve had the wrong priorities.

Case in point: I’ve spent more time worrying about what to write in this column than the 50-plus pages of academic writing I have to do in the next two weeks. There are supposed to be rules for these things. Around the same time I first cracked open the Iliad, I learned the inverted pyramid—most important stuff on top, quote by the fourth graf, cut from the bottom. It’s second nature now, and I can dash off 500 words on a lawsuit or press conference on a tight deadline without breaking a sweat.

But here, writing about myself and about Spectator, making my debut on the Opinion page in my last week of school, I’m a little out of my element. You’ll have to bear with the learning curve.

Besides the inverted pyramid, the thing I most remember an older, wiser editor teaching me in my first weeks on Spec was this: even if you don’t like Spec as an institution, even if you don’t really like journalism, it’s a great way to be a student at Columbia and a resident of New York City. As it turned out, I made most of my best friends at Spec, and I’m pursuing a career in journalism. But I still think the most valuable thing I got from Spec was that other thing she was talking about—a mode of engagement, a role to play on this campus and in this city where it’s so easy to get lost in the shuffle.

I could have easily ended up in a different role. Spec was just one of many things I dabbled in during my first year. At the end of my first semester, I ran for associate news editor, lost, and figured I’d have to find my mode of engagement elsewhere.

Then, an editor took a chance on me. In a spectacular lapse of judgment, he put me in charge of covering Columbia’s proposed Manhattanville expansion. A 19-year-old kid who didn’t know a blight study from a floor-area ratio, I had to do my best to fairly cover a $4 billion real estate deal where the future of the University and the West Harlem neighborhood hung in the balance. I was in way over my head, but I had a lot of help.

For the next three years, the story was my baby. I never imagined how much of my college education would come sitting in the back of Community Board 9 meetings, going off the record at briefings with administrators, trolling through auto shops and storage warehouses, and poring over zoning manuals and FOIL documents.

I developed a deep respect for the neighborhood and its inhabitants, and the people who told me their stories—in West Harlem, at Columbia, and elsewhere—taught me more than most professors could.

At the cost of a few (OK, maybe more than a few) skipped classes, blown deadlines, and sleepless nights, I thought I was getting a bargain. Having the wrong priorities seemed a lot more fun than having the right ones. But there was another, more significant trade-off. To be a spectator meant that I couldn’t be a participant. I couldn’t take sides, and couldn’t partake in the many student activities that I had imagined myself immersed in when I came to Columbia wanting to do my bit to save the world.
But after a while, being a reporter started doing weird things to me. I felt naked going out without carrying a notebook, just in case. I started following fire engines. I entertained the fleeting hope, on more than one slow news day, that someone would decide to blow up Low Library. And for better or for worse, it became harder to champion a cause without the sneaking suspicion that there’s got to be another side to this story.

As City News Editor I spent less time out reporting and more inside 2875 Broadway (craning my neck out the window, of course, at the sound of a passing siren). I was a dumb kid in way over my head all over again, and sometimes it was bad—the office politics got to be too much, or the torrent of (sometimes well-deserved) criticism became overwhelming, and I had to grab a friend and escape to the bathroom or the roof to respect the unwritten rule that there’s no crying allowed in the newsroom.
What I remember more, though, are the things that kept me coming back, for those 40-, 50-, 60-hour weeks for which we were rewarded mostly in bad pizza, free booze, and stolen office supplies. The exhausted satisfaction of falling into bed after putting out a quality issue. The strange 4 a.m., all-in-this-together camaraderie. A semester full of Ahmadinejad, hate crimes, hunger strikes, and a million more breaking stories. The opportunity to take a chance on a young writer the way my editors took a chance on me, and see it pay off. And at the end, drinking champagne on the Spec roof in the snow at 5 a.m., after 40 hours of interviewing and debating in the fetid newsroom, after choosing some of those young writers we had taken a chance on to be our successors.

To the people who were there with me, who taught me everything I know, gave me a shoulder to lean on, defended me often and called me on my shit when I needed that more, and in the process, became some of my best friends in the world—thank you. And thank God for misplaced priorities.

The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in political science. She was a City News Deputy on the 130th Deputy Board and the City News Editor on the 131st Managing Board.